Estimation of Photovoltaic System Location and Orientation from Power Signals

We present a methodology and associated software implementation for estimating the latitude, longitude, tilt, and azimuth of a fixed-tilt photovoltaic (PV) array from a measured power signal. Our major contribution to this line of research is developing a robust estimation procedure for the local sunrise and sunset time from the power data and creating reusable, open-source code implementations. We validated the proposed algorithms on a labeled data set comprised of a fleet of more than 4400 inverter power measurements at 400 unique sites.